Flooding in the Philippines

The Philippines prepared for mass burials of flash-flood victims Monday to minimise the health risk from rotting cadavers after a disaster that has left many hundreds dead or missing.

Hard-pressed authorities in the port cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, on the desperately poor and conflict-torn southern island of Mindanao, are struggling to cope with the enormous devastation left by tropical storm Washi.

The death toll stands at 652 dead and 911 people are listed as missing, according to Philippine National Red Cross chief Gwendolyn Pang, after Washi triggered flash floods and landslides that swept away entire coastal villages.

Bodies that were washed out to sea have begun rising to the surface, and mortuaries are overwhelmed as emergency teams struggle to find survivors and tend to some 47,000 people huddled in evacuation centres.

Up to 50 of about 300 bodies recovered in Iligan since Washi struck in the early hours of Saturday will be communally interred, possibly during the day, so that they do not pose a health risk, city mayor Lawrence Cruz said.

It has not been possible to determine a precise time for the flooding event. It is described as happening early in the morning of the 17th. We set a time that should capture the beginning as well as the developing understanding that this was a large scale tragedy.
The GCP event was set for the 24 hour period beginning at 02:00 local time on the 17th of December (18:00 UTC on the 16th).
The result is Chisquare 86449.489 on 86400 df for p = 0.452 and Z = 0.121.

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish
signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be
largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.